When things happen, they sometimes leave a smear on the windshield of the car of life. I'm here to help investigate what that smear is, and if possible, to take a sample to catalog it for future study. Until we get the results from this analysis, we'll need to postpone final judgment.
Oh my stars...joy upon joys...the next installment of Diablo III is coming. Finally Blizzard (the shop responsible for the genre expanding Warcraft series) is focusing development efforts on the Diablo world. Diablo was my first serious foray into PC gaming, having spent countless hours playing it at a certain textbook and software publishing house in Emeryville, when I was also starting my foray into Business Intelligence. During the close of the month I had to kick off a manual process of building text files used to construct OLAP cubes, which I then employed to run scheduled and ad hoc analyses and reports. During the file build, I'd fire up Diablo II and wail away at monsters, collect weapons, and hire mercenaries to fight by my side. There was some initial buzz over what Blizzard was doing, as some of the recent content they put online didn't clearly state what was happening., but at the Worldwide Invitational in Paris, France, they announced their next title would be Diablo III. No release date was indicated, but from the demo material that they released, the POV is top-down like in I and II, the gameplay is updated, and includes destructible environments, enhanced 3D graphics, and new character classes. It looks glorious. After playing Diablo II and the Lord of Destruction expansion pack to death many years ago, I'm going to need to break it out to get back into the mindset of what is Diablo.
I'd just ported over my blog to wordpress, and have been tinkering with stuff over there, when just today I find that Google has finally put some effort into enhancing Blogger...so I'm going to try it out.
Meanwhile, I came into work today (it's been busy, hence no postings) and found that the 12th St BART Station was closed because of 'police activity'. Normally this means the cops had to lay the beatdown on someone who was acting a fool, but SFGate reports the presence as a result of a 'suspicious device'. Sheriffs, OPD, BART po-leece, and helicopters were in full force. Still, my money's on the real Oakland gangsta pictured at left.
Who dat, you ask? That's Deborah Edgerly. She alledgedly interfered in the police towing her nephew's car, and threatened them to call Internal Affairs, while also warning her nephew about an increased police presence because of his affiliation with his rough riders. Her nephew, rolls with some other thug-lifas in Oakland. What is it with this city? Ron Dellums is sitting in his office, drinking his Ensure, while the city continues to crumble.
If I didn't know better, I'd think Project Mayhem was running afoot in my hood.
Regardless, things are looking good on the horizon, once we can clear the air from all the fires, weather a drought, and squeak through a $5/gal gas summer. Truly, now when you see someone rolling an H3 or some other Earth Destroyer 2009 model, it's textbook conspicuous consumption: I drive this because I can afford the shitty gas mileage...or I'm too dumb to care that the cost to fill the tank rapes my bank account.
But seriously people, the light is at the end of the tunnel...and let's hope it's not another train. We're going to be shedding Bushco, and although we're going to be collectively paying for its mistakes through our lives and possibly the lives of our grandchildren, it'll be better.
It's almost like we had to hit rock-bottom to know what we had to do. How bad could it get? Pretty bad. We had to feel it before we could even be ready for the possibility of Obama. Is he going to take it? I think so. Will he be able to prevent people from thinking a 40oz wrapped in a paper bag is a 'suspicious device' inside the BART terminal? Probably not, but it's a start.
...and I'm glad to have been proven wrong. Obama is now the first Black Presidential nominee, as he's secured the delegates necessary to clinch the nomination from the Democratic Party. Clinton's essentially been a shining star, and done the best thing for the party and will be easing to the left in order to keep the Democrats from tearing at each other's throats.
GOP...look out. I'm foretelling that McCain will not be able to stand up to the wave that Obama is riding in...and given McCain's close relationship with Bush, Americans do not want to elect a Bush II candidate. Dubya has done more to turn Americans off of 'compassionate conservatism' than any U.S. President before. Perhaps it was necessary, else how could we have arrived here. This must feel like what my parents felt when JFK was elected. Let's hope that it doesn't the same way.
Also in the news...several white papers describing how to implement a stable and clean manner of nuclear fission was discovered in Dubya's desk today, strategically hidden under a hardbound copy Scott McClellan's White House expose. When asked about it and the incontrovertible truth it contained, he said, 'How did that get there? That's not mine!'
The Tesla motor company received anonymous donations today, enabling them to flood the market with affordable and spirited electric cars, thus severing American dependency on the petroleum teat.
Chevron recorded record losses, while public education spending increased and state and national ledgers finally edged back into the black.
Recent non-partisan surveys revealed that Americans feel pretty good about the changes and are happy that we're moving away from a government that thrives on stagnant fear, to one that thrives on optimism and moving forward.
All silliness aside, you know what's so compelling about Obama, and what's going to put him in office? Our votes of course, but the fact that he genuinely resonates with people. I think some older, perhaps more Conservative-oriented people don't get this. It's like a dog whistle, some people hear it, and others can't. Excellent comparison, Howard. Totally unrelated, and for a certain reader, who recently exclaimed 'I like reading your blogs on gaming', here's some fabulous coverage of one the newly released COD 4 PC multiplayer maps...'Creek':
My hard drive just crapped out on me last night, and I spent a few hours getting a new drive installed and configured, so haven't been able to check this out yet, but will soon. This time around, I'm going to be running a dual-boot machine (Windows XP Pro SP3 and Ubuntu's Linux). Gaming and iTunes will be relegated to the XP partition, while all the evil dastardly deeds will be executed from the Ubuntu environment.
Interested in doing it to your XP machine? Did you know that you can install Ubuntu directly onto a machine running XP? Yup. Check it out here. The Ubuntu install comes with OpenOffice.org apps, which are fully compatible with Windows and Adobe formats. the best thing: it's free and constantly updated by the Ubuntu user community.
Oh my stars...joy upon joys...the next installment of Diablo III is coming. Finally Blizzard (the shop responsible for the genre expanding Warcraft series) is focusing development efforts on the Diablo world. Diablo was my first serious foray into PC gaming, having spent countless hours playing it at a certain textbook and software publishing house in Emeryville, when I was also starting my foray into Business Intelligence. During the close of the month I had to kick off a manual process of building text files used to construct OLAP cubes, which I then employed to run scheduled and ad hoc analyses and reports. During the file build, I'd fire up Diablo II and wail away at monsters, collect weapons, and hire mercenaries to fight by my side. There was some initial buzz over what Blizzard was doing, as some of the recent content they put online didn't clearly state what was happening., but at the Worldwide Invitational in Paris, France, they announced their next title would be Diablo III. 
